On Wed, Aug 16, 2017 at 06:58:32PM +0200, Philip Hands wrote: > Colin Watson <cjwat...@debian.org> writes: > > ... > > If you want to consider this bug closed at this point without a formal > > resolution, then I'm OK with saving you folks some time, ... > > I think that's fine, so I'm going to just close the bug now.
Fine by me at least, thanks Phil. Following OdyX's suggestion I'm appending my initial draft for a resolution that turned out to be unnecessary. Maybe this is helpful in some way. Please note that this has not been reviewed by other tech-ctte members except partly Phil. Any errors (factual or otherwise) are therefore all mine. === Draft resolution === The Technical Committee has been asked for advice regarding a GRUB upgrade failure caused by a configuration file in the init-select package. The default contents of this configuration file in the current oldstable distribution (jessie) have a bug that triggers when the init-select package is removed but not purged. The package has since been removed from Debian and does not exist in the current stable distribution (stretch) or in unstable/testing. Normal system upgrades from jessie to stretch result in the package getting removed due to other dependencies, leading to an upgrade failure. While fixing the configuration file in oldstable in a point release would mitigate the issue, it would leave upgrades straight to current stable affected. Therefore a fix in a stable point release would be preferrable (but does not rule out fixing this in oldstable too.) The fix can go either in the (now obsolete) configuration file, or GRUB's handling of it. As there is no package left responsible for cleaning away the configuration file, changes in the GRUB handling would be needed potentially forever and would therefore cause a long term maintenance burden. By contrast, fixing the configuration file is a one-time operation. The Committee therefore resolves that: 1. We advise the GRUB maintainer to take over management of the offending configuration file. Actual changes in the configuration file (modifying or removing it) are not in scope of this resolution and are governed by normal Debian policies and procedures. 2. Developers who consider this takeover to violate the Debian Policy are invited to voice their concerns via the normal policy process so that the policy can be amended if necessary. === End Draft Resolution === The change proposed by Guillem in <20170702011536.kux7dnmybmbsv...@gaara.hadrons.org> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=863801#22 to introduce a comment in the configuration file (instead of removing it straight away) seems sound to me and might have been part of the advice but we never got as far as discussing that. -- Niko Tyni nt...@debian.org
